Diane Merrick boutique in Los Angeles
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Diane Merrick’s Influential Boutique Closes
After 45 years running a boutique selling cashmere, jeans, china and antiques to generations of Los Angelenos, Diane Merrick is closing her namesake boutique. On Jan. 28, she announced the closing sale for the Diane Merrick boutique at 7407 Beverly Blvd., near Los Angeles’ Fairfax District.
“It’s time to leave,” she said. “I had the most marvelous run. I am thrilled to have come this far in 45 years.”
She forecast that her boutique’s doors would finally close in June.
The Diane Merrick boutique was particularly well known as finishing school for a generation of Los Angeles’ boutique retailers and designers. Among those who worked at the boutique were the founders of Juicy Couture, Gela Nash-Taylor and Pamela Skaist-Levy; Claire Stansfield of the C&C California T-shirt label; and Tracey Ross, who ran her own influential, self-named boutique in Los Angeles for nearly 20 years from the 1990s to 2009.
Merrick opened her fashion boutique in the 1970s as California was finessing a casual style that would be embraced across the world. She maintained a space on Melrose Avenue until 2006, when she moved her operations to Beverly Boulevard.
Through her more than four decades of business, she developed a specialty with cashmere. “I’m known for my cashmere shawls. It’s like a mainstay,” she said in a 2015 interview.
In the same interview, she also gave this advice for longevity in business: “The most important advice is that you love what you do. To have passion for what you are doing and have passion for you are selling. And you have to be in touch with your customer.”
